Why this site is built the way it is
A researcher's website is a scholarly instrument, not a brochure. Every decision here — typography, structure, metadata, performance — is chosen to make the work more findable, more credible, and more durable. Here is the reasoning.
Editorial serifs signal scholarship
The display face is Fraunces and the reading face is Newsreader — both optical-size serif families drawn for long-form text. Serif typography carries an inherited association with the printed scholarly record: journals, monographs, university presses. That association is not decorative. It tells a first-time visitor, in the first half-second, that this is a place for careful reading rather than marketing.
The generic sans-serif defaults of the web — Inter, Roboto, system-ui — are engineered to disappear. For a researcher, disappearing is the wrong goal. The measure is held near sixty-five characters, the line-height at 1.5, and the scale limited to a handful of deliberate steps, so that a dense CV and a discursive research essay feel like they belong to the same publication.
A radius-0 structural grid
Corners are square, rules are hairline, and the layout is built on an explicit grid with intentional asymmetry rather than a soft, rounded card aesthetic. The visual language borrows from technical publishing and data sheets — the documents engineers actually trust. Sharp geometry reads as precise and unembellished, which is exactly the register a body of experimental work should be presented in.
Section rhythm is systematised: the first section of every page inherits banner spacing, the last inherits a compact call-to-action cadence, and alternating surfaces mark the reader's progress down the page. Consistency here is not aesthetic fussiness; it lowers the cognitive cost of moving between publications, teaching, and contact.
A restrained system, not a mood board
Two anchors, nine accents
The palette pairs the WordPress and IBM Carbon blues — reference points from serious software design — with nine further accents defined in perceptual OKLCH so that contrast stays even as the hue changes. The visitor can pick the accent; the structure never depends on it.
Dominant base, sharp accent
Ink and surface carry the page; the accent is reserved for links, active states, and the single most important action. Meaning is never encoded in colour alone, so the hierarchy survives for colour-blind readers and in print.
Two themes, one intent
Both themes are first-class. Dark mode is a deep, desaturated charcoal rather than pure black, preserving depth and reducing eye strain during the late-night reading and writing that research runs on. Every surface, border, and state maps to a token, so the hierarchy that makes the primary action obvious in daylight remains obvious at midnight.
Print-ready CV and structured citations
A researcher's CV must survive being printed to PDF and pasted into a grant portal. The stylesheet includes a print path that strips chrome and reflows the curriculum vitae into a clean, paginated document — no screenshots, no broken layouts.
Publications carry Highwire Press metadata and JSON-LD structured data so that Google Scholar, indexing services, and reference managers can parse authors, venue, and dates without guessing. Being correctly indexed is the difference between a paper that accrues citations and one that is invisible.
A token system that outlives redesigns
Change once, change everywhere
Spacing, colour, radius, and type derive from a single set of CSS variables. A future redesign edits tokens, not templates, so the site can evolve across a decade-long career without a rebuild.
Editable where it should be
Content lives in WordPress custom post types and fields, not in markup. Adding a paper or a talk is data entry; the design system renders it correctly by default.
Reachable by everyone, including machines
The markup is semantic HTML first, with ARIA added only where native elements fall short. Every interactive control is keyboard reachable, focus rings are visible and offset, targets meet the forty-four-pixel minimum, and text meets WCAG AAA contrast in both themes. A site that reaches a screen-reader user, a low-vision reviewer, and a search-engine crawler equally is simply a site that reaches more of the audience research is meant for.
A performance budget, kept
The theme is classic PHP with a small, deliberate JavaScript bundle rather than a heavy framework. Animations use CSS transforms and honour reduced-motion preferences; images are lazy-loaded; the main-thread budget stays under sixteen milliseconds a frame. Fast pages rank better, cost reviewers less patience, and load on the conference-hall wifi where a talk is often first looked up.
The reasoning, made concrete
Browse the design system, or read the two hundred concrete ways this site works for the research it carries.